FW: Library infrastructure

[Malcolm Wallace]

Henrik Nilsson <nilsson@cs.yale.edu> writes:

> Well, the non-support for Hugs is an important point. We also wanted
> support for mixed-language builds, i.e. parts of a system written in
> C/C++ or Java. We wanted support for installation and building of
> distributions (source distributions, binary distributions with installation
> support, RPMs, ...). We wanted support for building documentation of
> various forms.

I agree that hmake is not intended for most of those tasks.  It just
builds software written in Haskell.

> That said, maybe a mixed make/hmake build system might have been better than
> our current make-only system, except, of course, that hmake then would be
> yet another tool the end user would need to install to get going.

You are probably already requiring the end user to install a Haskell
compiler/interpreter, a C/Java compiler, and a documentation tool
(LaTeX, Haddock, DocBook, whatever).

> > Many pre-processors are also supported by hmake, and it is easy to
> > add new ones.
> 
> How? By scripting hmake through some kind of hmake file? Or by changing
> the source? The latter would not really be quite good enough in my opinion,
> since one may want to support non-standard pre-processors for some
> particular project.

At the moment, indeed you need to change the sources.  However, I have
been playing for a long time with the idea of detecting/configuring
pre-processors externally in much the same way that compilers are
currently detected/configured.  I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard.
If there is enough demand I'll probably do it.

Regards,
    Malcolm